
June 23 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
- I’m A Fan£14.99
Join us when we welcome Sheena Patel to the shop to read from and discuss her extraordinary debut novel, I’M A FAN. Please note that tickets are very limited and are expected to sell out quickly, but the event will be recorded and available to listen to later also.
A single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, the narrator unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world, in turn offering a devastating critique of access, social media, patriarchal heteronormative relationships, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.
In this incendiary debut, Sheena Patel announces herself as a writer capable of rendering a range of emotions and visceral experiences on the page. Sex, violence, politics, tenderness, humour – Patel handles them all with both originality and dexterity of voice.
‘Pure fire from start to finish. Sheena Patel is the future.’ — Niven Govinden
Sheena Patel is a writer and assistant director for film and TV who was born and raised in North West London. She is part of the poetry collective 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE and her debut novel I’M A FAN was published by Rough Trade Books in 2022.
4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE have given performances and talks across the UK and internationally, including at the British Library, Tate, the Muscat Literature Festival, and as a support act for Sleaford Mods. Their work has been featured on Poetry Unbound and British Vogue.
Sophie Heawood grew up in York, where she went to the local schools while longing to attend Mallory Towers. She studied languages at Kings College London but dropped out and eventually got her degree at night school. She has lived in Barcelona, where she was a teenage au pair, Hong Kong, where she acted as an extra in low-budget Chinese soap operas, and Los Angeles, where she interviewed celebrities for British newspapers. Her journalism career began writing pop music reviews for the Guardian and she now writes for The Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and Vogue. Sophie now lives in Hackney, East London with her daughter and their dog, Chips. Her bestselling memoir, The Hungover Games, was published by Cape in 2020 and has been optioned for TV.